Grow Your Good

As the Development Associate at Legal Outreach, I worked with the Executive Director and Director of Development to identify and cultivate major donors. This included following up with attendees of the organization’s 30th Anniversary Gala, as well as regularly communicating with the 30+ member Advisory Board. I also created a prospect list of high-profile NYC attorneys and researched the giving potential of our prospects.

I plan to talk about the day-to-day tasks involved with major donor cultivation because that was one feature of my role at LO. The little things make all the difference! I hand-wrote Christmas cards for the Board, designed quarterly newsletters to keep donors engaged, ensured students hand-wrote donor thank you cards, sent personalized thank you letters to individual donors, and more. I also helped facilitate service opportunities for potential major donors, such as mentoring, judging debate competitions, or presenting awards at students’ award ceremonies, so that prospective donors could see Legal Outreach’s work in action and feel a real connection to the organization they would be supporting.

Our persistent donor engagement paid off with several individual donations ranging from $5,000 to $15,000 each, which helped significantly with meeting the organization’s $2.3M annual budget. Additionally, my signature project was designing LO’s first-ever crowdfunding campaign, which turned already engaged volunteers into donors for the first time. The online campaign raised $15,000 in about 6 weeks. I plan to draw from this experience as well as talking about tapping volunteers as potential major donors.